Hippies Were Happy

Hippies have a bad
reputation, especially among conservatives. In 1967, the “National Review”
said that hippies were self-indulgent and had a “horrified rejection of work
and production”. Their thinking, “if indeed thinking it can be called, is more
like orgiastic love-spluttering than coherent thought.” They might cause
“outbreaks of polio and typhoid”.

In 2007, Ted Nugent remarkably blamed “stoned, dirty, stinky hippies” for “rising rates of divorce, high
school drop-outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention
the exponential expansion of government and taxes.”

The most popular speaker at
the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference, Duck Dynasty star Phil
Robertson, received a huge applause
for claiming that millions of cases of STD’s today are “the revenge of the
hippies!”

Even less hysterical
commentators still want to blame hippies for all of our ills: in 2010, David
Brooks of the NY Times blamed the hippie “agenda”
for the New York City crime wave of the 1970s.

Historians also saw hippies as scapegoats. In The Unraveling of America
(1984, p. 277), Allen J. Matusow asserted that they did not believe in reason,
progress, order, achievement, or social responsibility, probably because “Few
hippies read much”. More recently, Micah Issitt said in Hippies: A Guide to an
American Subculture (2009, p. 64-5) that hippies were personally irresponsible,
poor parents, and unwilling to contribute to anything more than their own
pleasure, and he blamed hippie advocacy of free love for climbing divorce
rates.

These stereotypes of hippies
were created by people who hated them and didn’t want to understand them.

Hippies utterly rejected the
consumer life. They believed that watching the clock, dressing for success, and
hoping for the next raise damaged the soul. Hippies put a lot of stress on
stress. Unlike most people, they were willing to make big sacrifices to avoid
stress. The anxieties of modern working life, the pressures of schedules, and
the confrontations with authority were not worth the hassle. At a time when
daily life was being compared to a rat race, hippies wanted to leave it all
behind.

Hippies took spirituality
seriously. They created lives far out of the mainstream in order to preserve
and nurture their spirit. Traditional gods did not play a big role in hippie
spirituality. Some remained with traditional religions, but tended to worship
on their own. Many, perhaps most, hippies imagined their own spiritual worlds,
blending the social gospel of Western faiths with the inward search of some
Eastern beliefs. A love of nature often focused on the Earth as a living being
and maternal symbol. In religion, as in every area of belief and behavior,
hippies were independent spirits.

Hippies did not get in your
face. They didn’t send out mailers or make phone calls or knock on doors or
shout into microphones. They didn’t believe that their way was necessarily
better for everyone. They wanted to do their own thing.

Hippies were peaceful. That
attitude went far beyond signs and symbols, and was more profound than
opposition to the Vietnam War. Hippies thought that peace is meant to rule our
daily lives, from international relations to the family home. When they raised two
fingers and said “Peace”, they converted a plea for cooperation into a daily
greeting.

Hippies abhorred violence.
For trying to escape or end the draft, they were labeled cowards, but they were
not. They stood up to the entire straight world, including every familiar
figure of authority, to say “No,” we don’t want that life. The hippie approach
to violence has been forever symbolized in the 1967 photo
of a protester putting a flower into a National Guardsman’s gun in front of the Pentagon.

Hippies got high. That didn’t
distinguish them from normal folks. They used a different set of drugs – not
depressants like alcohol or pills, but marijuana and psychedelics, including
LSD, peyote and mushrooms. Their infrequent bad trips were only bad for
themselves. They were less likely to drive drunk or get into brawls than the
people who criticized them for using dope.

Hippies were ahead of their
time. Their unconventional ideas about gender equality, their acceptance of a
variety of sexualities, and their preference for organic products and
vegetarian diets are now widely accepted. “Question authority” is now a bumper
sticker, but few actually reject social authority as profoundly as did the hippies.

Hippies were less likely to
cause trouble than most people. Hippie “crime” was typified by the illegal
planting of flowers in People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969. But that didn’t stop
people from causing trouble for them. They were called lazy, irresponsible and
un-American. Hippie rejection of conventional American life made them pariahs
in a country supposedly founded on individualism and freedom.